Making Free Speech a Hate Crime
Jerry A Kane
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Well, I’ve been wondering what might be the final straw. If this isn’t it, it’s as close as it gets. You should email or fax you’re SENATORs immediately to tell them you will not stand for this FULL abridgement of our 1st Amendment Rights!
Jerry A. Kane is an English professor who has recently joined the American Daughter family of writers. This is his second article, and I urge you all to cross-post this and to share as widely as possible with your email contact lists.
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Making Free Speech a Hate Crime
By Jerry A. Kane | Thursday, May 7th, 2009 at 12:00 pm
The hate crime bill that passed the U.S. House of Representatives
April 29 is an attempt by democratic socialists and progressives to
silence dissent against alternative lifestyles. Their incessant
iconoclastic attacks on once established values and morality have
nearly eroded this nation’s spiritual and cultural legacy. Instituting
same-sex marriage and prosecuting hate speech will complete the
process and shatter the remaining hopes for cultural regeneration and
tear down the last vestiges of the country’s Judeo-Christian ethic.
In America’s brave new post-modern multiculture, homosexual and
transgender people will become a federally-protected class under the
Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009, HR-1913.
Under this act, anyone who publicly opposes the practice of
homosexuality or any of the 30 other sexual orientations as designated
by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) could be charged with
expressing “hateful words” and convicted of a “hate crime.”
Under the guise of tolerance, Canada and European countries have
implemented hate crimes legislation to suppress expressions that
conflict with public opinion or do not conform to politically-correct
policies, i.e., the views of the state are the views of the people.
Only designated groups and minorities belong to the protected classes.
The majority of Canadians and Europeans are not free to express
politically incorrect religious beliefs, moral convictions, and
political ideas publicly for fear they may enrage members in the
protected classes.
Britain’s hate crimes legislation should be renamed the Islam
Protection Act. In January 2007, British television aired Undercover
Mosque, a documentary about Islamic extremism in Britain. The
documentary was based on a 12-month secret investigation into mosques
throughout the nation. In the footage, Muslim preachers exhort
followers to prepare for jihad, incite violence against non-Muslims,
urge followers to reject British laws, and praise the Taliban for
killing a British soldier.
Leaders in the Muslim community complained the film was discriminatory
and intimidating, so the police requested that the Crown Prosecution
Service (CPS) prosecute the film-makers for “stirring up racial
hatred.” By ignoring facts and what had actually happened, the police
and CPS found common ground with the film’s detractors — that is to
say, they agreed the Islamic clerics were harmless victims whose
sermons were “taken out of context” and condemned the film-makers for
religious bigotry and inciting racial hatred. Alas, clairvoyance has
supplanted the blindfolded matron, Lady Justice.
Hate crimes legislation allows a country’s legal system to disregard
any notion of equality under the law, and apply it unequally and
selectively, which means that some citizens are harassed, prosecuted,
and convicted, while others are not. In Canada and European countries,
hate crime prosecutions of heterosexuals, non-Muslims, or
non-Socialists exceed those of homosexuals, Muslims, and socialists.
Hate crime laws are rarely enforced when slurs, insults, invectives,
and ridicule are hurled at members in the majority group. For example,
in May 2006, a Belgium man filed a complaint with the police against
the Center for Equal Opportunities and Opposition to Racism because he
was offended by the agency’s use of the words “Dirty Heterosexual” in
its postcard distribution campaign. The agency director said that
stigmatizing or discriminating against majorities is “not real
discrimination” and dismissed the man’s objections with laugher
saying, “Discrimination is something that by definition affects
minorities.”
Hate crime laws establish a preferential justice system and create a
double standard in the legal system that fosters distrust, conflict,
and intolerance in a society. Such laws suggest that members of a
minority group deserve a higher level of justice than those of the
majority, which makes members of the minority group more important and
morally superior. In Austria, it’s not considered degrading to
Christians if Jesus is portrayed in homosexual acts with his apostles,
but it is degrading to Muslims if the historical fact that Muhammad
married a six-year old girl is mentioned.
In Britain, a 69-year-old evangelical was prosecuted for displaying a
protest sign with the words “Stop Immorality. Stop Homosexuality. Stop
Lesbianism.” Objecting to his peaceful protest, hecklers knocked him
down, threw dirt on him, poured water over his head, and tried to take
his placard. The police came and arrested the protester, but did
nothing to those who assaulted him.
The magistrates’ court ruled that the words on the placard could be
harassing, alarming, and distressful for homosexuals who may find the
words threatening, abusive, or insulting. Consequently, the
evangelical protester was fined and ordered to pay court costs for
displaying words that might offend the delicate sensibilities of a
protected class member, but the criminal actions of the hecklers who
assaulted him were disregarded and left unpunished.
Fears that hate crime laws will eventually lead to criminalizing
speech are not unfounded. In 2001, a Saskatchewan resident published
an ad in a local newspaper that consisted of a few Bible verses and an
illustration of two stickman figures holding hands inside a circle
with a line though it. The Saskatchewan Human Rights Tribunal ordered
the resident and newspaper to pay $4,500 to three homosexuals who had
been traumatized and scarred for life by the stickman illustration.
Polemicists who denounce homosexuality and same-sex marriage are no
less entitled to their opinions than the apologists who promote them.
What has happened to religious freedom and freedom of conscience
inCanada and Europe as the result of implementing hate crime laws is
clear. Make no mistake, if the recently passed hate crime bill becomes
law in the United States, freedom of speech will be sacrificed to
protect particular classes from criticism and all forms of upset,
making condemnation of homosexuality illegal.
Hate crime laws violate the fundamental notion that man’s natural
equality entitles him to impartial justice, which is the underlying
principle of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. How ironic the
counterculture left that chanted in the 1960s, “I may disapprove of
what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,”
now fights to enslave all Americans to the will of a totalitarian
bureaucracy.
Jerry A. Kane works part-time as
a technical writer and editor. He has spent almost two decades as an
adjunct English professor and over a decade as journalist. His
commentaries have appeared on WorldNetDaily, the American Thinker,
Canada Free Press, and in daily and weekly newspapers in western
Pennsylvania. Visit his blog, The Millstone Diaries, for more
commentaries and musings.